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I Am Here to Make Friends

Second Place 2012 Poetry Contest Winner

I Am Here to Make Friends

however mother the morning always from the mind, how every glamour
misrecords the ripening with munitions, first to do the work of others,
however our colleagues arpeggiate the palace we have always loved

into hexagons or filaments or excesses of nurture and aggregate,
so much more we hold with our addiction to letters r, p, q and s,
here among the dahlias in costume of the lovers, quiddity

so much more the world to be done wide, heart, because a three-legged
dog named zelda chases his tail happy down hawaiian beaches, the desert
accelerates, it pours itself sepia over our secrets; because to rely

increasingly on metaphors of deliberation, because the ornaments
are stripped from the victorian mansions, compiled in architecture
for the sunday rabbit, the forlorn and the poor, and the rustling ships

are broken somehow away and the dahlia are a discoloration of song
to fall our palms over and with our fingertips sweep the hair away
from the temples and arable land and sweep the water away, wreckage

of the aral sea, tender that has not decided upon itself, upon smooth
light through the clerestory from early findings: stockings for very long
wet legs in which the harbingers and we do not altogether disappear.

Contributors

Jeremy Behreandt was raised in Park Falls, Wisconsin, and currently resides in Madison. He received his BA in creative writing at UW–Eau Claire. His poetry has appeared in Conium Review, Mad Rush, New Gnus, and Wisconsin People & Ideas.

Wisconsin People & Ideas is the Academy's quarterly magazine of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture.